


But in this quiet company (I forget sometimes just how to breathe)

by Xenomorphic



Category: Doctor Sleep (2019), Doctor Sleep - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, POV Multiple, Post-Canon, They all live and they're all more or less messed up about it, book and movie canon, mentions of past violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:15:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21944215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xenomorphic/pseuds/Xenomorphic
Summary: Sometimes she wakes up screaming like she’s seeing, feeling Bradley’s death all over again.Sometimes the scar on his leg pulls and he swears he can feel Rose the Hat digging her nail in.Sometimes he feels the phantom pressure of the barrel of his riffle under his chin and a loud, whip-like “no” resonating inside his head.
Relationships: Abra Stone & Dan "Danny" Torrance, Billy Freeman/Dan "Danny" Torrance, Dan "Danny" Torrance & Lucy Stone, John Dalton & Dan "Danny" Torrance
Comments: 10
Kudos: 89





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing related to Doctor Sleep, either the book or the movie; I just love Dan, alright? Title is from the Of Monsters and Men's song, Hunger.  
> TW: mentions of past violence, physical and psychological. If you've read the book and/or watched the film, you might have a good understanding of the things I'm talking about, and this won't mean much, but better safe than sorry.  
> The chapters will be divided in "sections"; these "sections" are NOT in chronological order and are from different POVs.

The first time, after Abra and the True Knot, Dan knocks on his door at some insane hour in the morning, Billy’s awake and he thinks he understands, now. The _what_ , he’s still working on, but something; something that was always there for people to see and chose to ignore.

They both stand there, at the door, for a moment, neither one of them really knowing what to say, but understanding what they _mean_. He cracks a smile, just as much for his own sake as for Dan’s.

“Have you always known when I’m asleep or awake?”

“No,” Dan answers without skipping a beat, but there’s the twitch of a playful smile on his lips and an undercurrent of _something_ that doesn’t quite make the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end, but almost. That thing, like a warm touch against his mind, has been there for the last few days, maybe even the last few weeks.

“Right, I’ll pretend I believe you,” and Dan’s smile grows wider. “Want to hit the dinner?”

“Already did,” and as Dan says so he raises his arm and Billy notices the cloth bag dangling from his hand. It’s new, _this_ , but he doesn’t ask, yet.

Billy lets Dan walk in, grabs a worn hoodie to fend off the biting cold and puts on the coffee maker before settling on his bed next to where Dan is already hogging a blanket and trying to make himself comfortable with his bum leg. Dan should be fully healed in a month or so, but the muscle and the scar tissue have been a bitch on the man since he rejected any more painkillers, an understandable decision in the opinion of a fellow alcoholic.

“You good there, Danno?”

Dan hums noncommittally.

“Just a little sting.”

Dan uncaps his thermos, filled with hot cocoa from the dinner, Billy pours himself coffee, they dig into the apple pies and the chicken sandwiches. They don’t usually do anything as well prepared as this, unless they make the trek to Allie’s, often they simply drink coffee, sitting on his bed with their backs to the wall, and contemplate how depressing life can be. But tonight, the energy, the atmosphere, _Dan_ , whatever it is, feels different, more alive and less weighted, just like two friends sitting on a bench a sunny afternoon, catching up with each other’s lives. They _are_ friends, but they aren’t sunbathing somewhere nice, they’re just sitting in the half-dark of his rented room with the wind softly howling in the rafters, and he’s not entirely sure he’s up for catching up just now, but there is a thing he really wants to know.

“Dan, did you, or didn’t you, know I was awake?”

The man doesn’t answer at first, just sips his hot chocolate for a moment, contemplative.

“Would it bother you if I did?”

“I don’t know, haven’t thought of it,” and Billy takes his time, considers it. “I don’t think so, as long it’s nothing intrusive, I guess.”

Dan hums, draws slow circles with the thumb of his free hand on his leg.

“I wouldn’t call it _intrusive_. I don’t know how to explain it, but I have a way of knowing whether you’re asleep or unconscious or awake. Abra can do it too, she showed me how, actually.”

Billy looks at his friend, surprised. They’ve spoken about Abra, and the Stones, of course, kind of hard not to at least want to know how they’re faring, even harder to avoid it when it turns out that Lucy and Abra _are_ related to Dan. Most of the time though, Dan doesn’t mention Abra and the shining in the same conversation, even less in the same sentence.

Dan turns to look back at him, eyebrows raised in a silent question. He smirks.

“Can’t read my mind, Danno?”

He shrugs.

“Only if I want to, or if I catch something by blind luck, but I’m too tired for any of that.”

He looks it, too, dark bags under his eyes, almost like bruises, and a pale, waxy sort of touch to his complexion. He clearly hasn’t been sleeping well and the pain in his leg can’t possibly help.

“If I’m honest with you, here,” Dan starts, not looking at Billy. “I’ve known you’ve had trouble sleeping this last week or so.”

“But you didn’t say anything, why?”

He turns towards Billy again.

“I wanted to give you time, space?” There’s a pained look on his face, but he keeps going. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into any of it, Billy, it was dangerous and that woman –”

“Stop it, Dan. I know you’re the kind of person who would put the blame of the world on themselves, but it was _my_ choice, I’ve told you, and even though I didn’t really understood what was happening, I knew it was dangerous, just like I knew you weren’t going to leave it be or that Abra, or any other kid for that matter, was worth the risk.”

Dan doesn’t look convinced, but then again, Billy wasn’t expecting to pull him out of the pool of guilt he’s been swimming in for the last few weeks without working, hard, for it.

“And you know _you_ are the only reason I’m here right now,” he continues, because baby steps might help, anyway. “You were the one who did, whatever you did to, with my hands. I would’ve died then, if it hadn’t been for _you_.”

Dan closes his eyes, breathes heavily and leans half against the wall and half against Billy’s side. This way, Billy can feel the soft heat radiating from Dan all along his right arm, the tidal movement of Dan’s breathing.

“It really doesn’t feel like _I_ achieved anything.”

Billy leans away from Dan just enough so he can wrap his arm around the other man’s shoulders and pull him in.

“I know it doesn’t, I _know_.”

They don’t speak much the rest of the night, and at some point, they both fall into a light slumber, too tired to stay really awake, yet too shaken to truly fall asleep.

*

Her most recurrent nightmare is of the drive down the mountain and to the hospital, with Mr. Freeman, Billy, driving as fast as he dared and trying not to look to the backseat, afraid he might miss a turn and drop them down the mountain side, and Uncle Dan sprawled along the backseat like a fallen doll, his injured leg smearing blood all over her lap as she tried to put pressure into the slippery wound with her hands. She understood, sometime later, that Mr. Freeman’s belt around her Uncle’s leg was enough to stop the hemorrhage, but that was hard to comprehend for a shocked teenage girl, in the back of a car speeding down a snowed road on the side of a mountain, after the man who had protected her from a deranged _monster_ had lost consciousness from blood loss. And the less was said about the exploding building the better: she only half noticed it, either way.

Her second top nightmare was Bradley, the baseball boy. At least she stopped screaming with those after a couple of months.

*

While he’s at the hospital, Dan feels impossibly accompanied.

The first time he wakes up in the cold sterile room he both is and isn’t surprised to find Billy slouched in an awful looking, plastic chair, skimming over a fishing magazine. After that is almost like nobody wants to leave him alone, not Billy, not Abra, not even Lucy, David or DJ. Whenever he’s conscious the first couple of days there’s always someone, or several _someones_ , there in his room, unless his doctor or a nurse comes to check in. After that, they seem to come to the conclusion that no, he’s not going to just die or disappear on them, not anymore. Billy and Abra, however, seem to have more trouble letting go and spend long hours sitting with him talking or just reading.

During the afternoon of day four in the hospital, by which point he’s started to beg Billy to help him escape the clutches of his stern doctor, Abra is showing him yet another RWBY video when Lucy walks in carrying steaming cups of tea and Dan knows, _this_ is the moment they have _that_ talk.

All Lucy gets to do is open her mouth and make a weak, choked off sound when Dan interrupts her, as gently as he knows how.

“I think Abra should be here for this,” he starts, then amends, a little: “Or at least we should consider it.”

Lucy closes her mouth, suddenly at a loss, but then she makes up her mind and nods, walks closer and sets the cups on the nightstand before looking for a chair. Dan offers her to seat on his bed, she accepts, takes off her flats and stretches her legs alongside his. He’s surprised, to say the least, about her sudden familiarity and Abra looks at them suspiciously.

“You’re my brother, might as well get used to it,” Lucy shrugs it off, but there’s something else there and Dan’s not willing to let it go.

“Getting rid of the blood-suckers doesn’t hurt either, right?”

Abra gives him this half-stunned, half-amused look and Lucy huffs as she reaches for her tea.

“Billy was telling me what a great guy you are, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve been misled.”

He can’t help it, he giggles, and he’s still high enough on painkillers that he doesn’t bother saving face.

They talk for a long time. Mostly, it’s Dan telling his story, then Lucy telling hers, then asking an awful bunch of questions to each other until a nurse comes in and kicks the girls out so he can take a look at Dan and change the bandages on his leg.

Another two days later, and by then it’s only Lucy and Abra left, David gone to New York to see about Momo’s cremation and Billy and DJ back to work, all of them responsible, unharmed adults that they are. Lucy walks into his room carrying coffee just after Abra falls sleep half propped on the side of his bed. His sister – and isn’t that a doozy – sits on his other side, legs stretched out again, so her feet are by his hip and his feet are by hers. There’s a certain ease between them that’s less about knowing they’re related and more about knowing they have someone, who’s very important to the both of them, in common. In a way, that might matter more to them than genetics.

“You know,” he begins, just because it’s starting to eat away at him, these things building up inside of him, and he needs to tell someone, anyone who _isn’t_ Abra. “I could feel you coming, for the last five minutes, I just knew it.”

She gives him a startled look, but he knows it’s more because he brought it up than anything else.

“I had those moments, all the time, when I was a kid. I knew that Dad was coming soon, so I would sit by the sidewalk outside our building and wait for him. Even after the Overlook, when I was eight, or ten, or twelve, I would know if visits where coming, though it was always strongest when it was Dick, the man I told you about.”

Lucy has forgotten all about her coffee by now, all her attention on him, so he gives her a hand and drinks from his own coffee so she can notice it and copy him.

“The thing is, back then, my Mom was still so afraid: she was afraid of loud noises, especially banging on the walls or doors, and she was afraid of not knowing where I was or who I was with, but I think most of all, she was afraid for me, _of_ me. These things that I could do and know and see, she couldn’t protect me from any of it, and she also couldn’t understand it. So, I stopped telling her when people were coming, and Dick and I always talked out loud in front of her, and I ignored the things I knew she couldn’t see as best as I could. Until one day, one of our neighbors dropped by and I was genuinely surprised, because I _hadn’t_ felt her.”

He catches his breath for a second, sips his coffee and waits until Lucy drinks from hers.

“What I’m trying to say is, I spent most of my life keeping, or trying to, my shining inside a little box along with all of the ghosts that followed me from the Overlook, hoping it would eventually go away or that it would come the day it was so weak I could hardly notice it, or it would be these occasional flashes and maybe helping dying people go in peace, and by doing that, Billy almost shot himself and Abra was taken, because I hardly knew just what sorts of things I was capable of doing with it.”

He looks at Lucy, so intensely he knows he’s scaring her, but Dan needs her to know, to understand.

“I’m not going to try and shame you, or David, about how you’ve handled Abra’s powers, because I understand it’s scary, I knew it was scary for my Mom and the _seizures_ and talking about _Tony_ never helped, but now I’m here and Abra’s older, and she might not tell you this because you’re her mother, but I will: you need to stop being afraid and you need to support this side of her like you would any other thing she does, because a day might come when she will need to use the full extent of her power and she won’t _know_ what that extent is, because she locked it up somewhere deep inside of her, for your and David’s sake.”

Lucy nods, eyes wide and shiny, and Dan takes her coffee out of her hands and leaves their cups at the nightstand just as she starts crying, fat tears running down her cheeks and her face going a very unflattering shade of red, yet quiet, so quiet that Abra doesn’t even twitch.

Dan holds her and gently dries her face until she too falls asleep, the tension and tiredness draining out of her.


	2. Chapter 2

One night, early on January, Abra wakes up with a choked off noise and tears running down her face, the persistent, oppressive thought that Dan is dead echoing inside her head, he is dead, _her Uncle Dan is dead, he is_ –

It feels like when Dan, inside her body, had made the Crow crash the car they’d been in: first she’s quietly crying in her room, then there’s a violent pull, like a shift in gravity, and she’s in Uncle Dan’s room.

The room, larger than hers by very little, is half-dark at best, with the moon casting a pale light that comes in through the thin curtains and makes it easy for her to see the shelves haphazardly filled with books, the worn chair with the next day’s clothes folded on top and the lump on the bed, clearly moving – _breathing_ – under the gray feather comforter.

That should be enough for her to calm down, seeing who she knows is Uncle Dan sleeping in his own bed, should be all she needs to shake off the lingering hurt and fear from the nightmare and just calm down, but she can’t. So, Abra nears to the bed, floats towards the side of the bed closest to the window, even though she shouldn’t and a small part of her registers that she shouldn’t even be here, breaching Dan’s privacy like this, but she needs to know, to _see_.

Dan is sleeping on his left side, facing the window with one of his hands under his pillow and the other lost under the bedding. He looks… peaceful and maybe even a few years younger. She wants to wake him up, even as she feels herself relax and her breathing slow down, but she remembers Dan at the New Years’ dinner, sitting between her mom and Mr. Freeman, _feeling_ heavy and tired, with dark bags under his eyes and a slowness to his movements.

“I’m just tired,” had been all he told her when she asked if something was wrong, but there had been more to it, she’d seen it: an image, a _candid_ , of Dan and Mr. Freeman, Billy, lying down late at night in her uncle’s bed, almost impossibly close together, both of them awake and fully clothed – at least from what she could see, please, God, let them be _fully clothed_ –, talking and holding each other. Dan hadn’t noticed that she’d seen that, as far as she knew, and she’d tried her best to _vanquish_ it from her mind, since it was clearly a private moment – even if it wasn’t _that_ kind of private –, but she couldn’t, it was branded somewhere in her brain, yet what mattered about it was less the _Dan and Billy_ thing, and more the _not sleeping_ thing, which was something she already sort of knew and had confirmation of, then.

Because of that, and never mind that her Uncle had told her she could _drop by_ whenever she wanted, as long as she knocked first, Abra sits – as much as she can, being incorporeal and all – on the floor in front of Dan and doesn’t wake him up, just stays there and soaks up on the serenity and warmth the man exudes.

As the minutes pass, her heart stops racing, her mind empties and eventually she returns to her room and her body and goes back to sleep, Dan none the wiser about his nighttime visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late, short update. Self imposed quarantine hasn't been bad for me, but it hasn't been good either, and, surprisingly, I've only just now gotten back to writing thanks to Dark's finale. Keep safe in this trying times ya'll.


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